I’ve always loved Passover. Okay, not always; my three-quarters Jewish, mostly atheist family and I didn’t throw seders when I was growing up. But ever since college, I’ve been coming together with friends to read the Haggadah (albeit one with a queer, feminist, decidedly modern bent), break matzah apart, dip parsley in salt water, ask the Four Questions, and cheer on the youngest at the table as they found the afikomen. When Bernie Sanders dropped out of the 2020 presidential race on the first night of Passover, I quietly mourned, imagining what it would have been like to see someone in the White House sharing in these ancient traditions, and not just for PR points.
A major component of Passover, I learned as I grew up and graduated and made more Jewish friends—some, raised much more observant than I was—is the ritual of keeping kosher throughout the festival’s eight nights. Leavened bread is verboten, which basically means pasta, cereal, pancakes, cookies—or “carbs,” as I learned to think of these foods in middle school, when the specter diet culture first taught me to eschew them—are off-limits. I can’t help but think of the frustration that chef and author Gabrielle Hamilton recounts in her 2011 memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter, upon taking a job cooking at a summer camp and finding out that many of the girls were “eight years old and already weird about wanting a piece of bread.” I felt that frustration myself, knowing it was the epitome of bullshit to deny myself the foods I loved, but feeling too seduced by the mirage of thinness to live any other way.
Anxious partial Jew that I am, I’m always looking for ways to “confirm” that I’m doing things correctly on Jewish holidays. (Seriously, just ask me about my challah game.) But as someone who has struggled with disordered eating—and, specifically, binge eating disorder—for over a decade, I’ve always known that cutting out any food, even just for a week, and for spiritual reasons, would likely lead me right back to the worlds of bingeing, compensatory calorie-counting, and obsessive exercising I’d worked so, so hard to leave behind me.
All that changed this year, probably because my relationship with my faith has changed. Even as I mourn the violence in Gaza, the ongoing Israel–Hamas war has made me feel more connected to my Jewish faith than ever. I want to yoke myself more tightly to its traditions, if only to remind myself (and the loved ones I observe Passover with) that Judaism encompasses far more than any country or ideology or military ever could. I’m no longer comfortable with my connection to the Jewish faith being merely “cultural”; I want to observe some of the customs my ancestors did, like fasting or keeping kosher on specific holidays, to tether myself to what it means to be an active, open-eyed Jew in this world, one who learns from the pain of the past while also fighting for a liberated future.
I woke up on Monday, the first night of Passover, thinking about food, as I so often do. Unlike five years ago, when I might have begun the day calculating the calorie content of the banana and black coffee I’d allow myself for breakfast, now I menu-plan from bed with abandon, often going into the kitchen to whip up a stack of pancakes or pour myself a bowl of the full-fat cereal I never used to buy from the grocery store. On Monday, toast with almond butter sounded appealing before I remembered the bread was off-limited. So, I made a green smoothie instead before heading off to Pilates, knowing that I was enacting virtually every Los Angeles cliché known to man but not really caring.
In the middle of my Pilates class, however, something shifted. I’d gulped down my protein-rich smoothie before getting on my Reformer, knowing that I would need the sustenance, but my legs and arms soon started shaking when I held them up in the class’s guided poses. I’d seen this before, back in the days when I used to eat one RX Bar and then beeline to barre classes I couldn’t afford to attempt to work off the paltry “carb content.” I was always shaky and nauseous and pale in class, watching the lithe beauties around me do everything perfectly as I tried to ignore how, well, hungry I was. Now I’m healthy enough to know how to deal with that hunger—I immediately went home from class and made myself a huge, delicious bowl of fried rice—but when I was in the grips of my eating disorder, faintness and frailty were…well, not the goal, necessarily, but certainly acceptable side effects of my quest for thinness.
As relatively healed as I feel right now, I won’t lie; the moment freaked me out a little. I knew the reasons behind my hunger weren’t the same, but I was still edgy the rest of the day, annoyed at my body for “keeping the score,” as bodies are wont to do, while I tried to keep kosher. Was it possible that I would I backslide into an ED mindset—or even a full binge-eating episode—if I kept playing games with my food, even if those “games” were quite literally handed down by the Torah?
When I sat down to seder at my friend Sophie‘s house that night, though, the discomfort of the day melted away. I was surrounded by Jews and what my married-to-a-Jewish-woman goyische friend calls “Jewish culture appreciators,” and as we sang, cried, ate, laughed, and spread hearty helpings of Irish butter on Sophie’s dad’s perfectly charred homemade matzoh, I was reminded that fasting or keeping kosher wasn’t about isolating myself, as my eating disorder had forced me to do. It was instead about sharing something small and essential in common with your mishpocha, a term I’ve come to understand as “large, loud, blended family.”
I don’t know if I’ll keep kosher next Passover, or fast next Yom Kippur, but I want to, if only to feel closer to my lineage and offer something (however small) in sacrifice for the joy and love and chaos of my adult life. If I don’t, though, I know it’s also okay, because I alone write the rules of my spiritual life and identity. If I want to skip the fast for my mental and physical health, or eat trayf, or occasionally work on Shabbat (okay, I’m trying to quit this one), or support the students organizing for a free Palestine around the country, the God I choose to believe in won’t cast me out for it, so long as I show up for the community around me and do my best to learn more each year about my Jewish faith than I did at the preceding year’s seder table. To borrow a phrase from my Borscht Belt-adjacent forebears: “Good enough, right?”
